January’s best new translated fiction

By tilting our perception of reality just enough for us to see the peculiarity of what we take for granted, Johanne Lykke Holm devised a novel that is at its most startling when it is most ordinary. Strega, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (Lolli, 183pp, £14.99), is narrated by Rafaela who travels to the mountainous village of the book’s title, where, together with other young women, she begins to carry out repetitious tasks in a hotel that is almost always devoid of guests.

The impetus for the daily round of tedium is a puzzle that is echoed by the nearby convent – with the women at the hotel appearing to become a single organism, dreaming as one -, culminating in an apparition-like meeting with the nuns at night when a girl has gone missing: “We heard women’s voices. We saw shadows that seemed to belong to real bodies. Black coats with white details.” In this novel, all evocations are like whispered secrets. From sentence to sentence, the obvious is always withheld amid a disquieting, ambient fog in which the principal struggle is to locate oneself.

Existential conflict is also a major part of The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier, translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 499pp, £16.99) and in which the assumptions made by the characters we are introduced to are startlingly upended. This is especially so with Patrice Bergogne, a farmer in a small village called La Bassée whose wife, Marion, is about to celebrate her 40th birthday. His inclination towards self-reproach is already evident when he goes to a nearby town to purchase a present for Marion and displays both impulsiveness and incompetence in ways that further dismantle his self-worth.

Ida – the daughter of Marion and Patrice, who regularly stays with Christine, a painter who moved to the hamlet in which the farm is located – is looking forward with eagerness to the ways in which this day will extinguish the usual incommunicative coldness that exists between her parents. But, as the reader is already aware, such hope is misplaced. A violent incursion will soon change the nature of the day. The tension of the novel increases greatly but the style of the novel – the attentive detailing of each character’s attempt to comprehend these unfolding events – remains steadfast, giving it the quality of a Michael Haneke film.

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As confusion gives way to an understanding of how much Marion’s past is central to what is happening, the novel begins to be tested against our hope that this level of apprehension will resolve in a satisfactory ending. This astute thriller doesn’t disappoint.

If serenity is called for, then A Mountain To The North, A Lake To The South, Paths To The West, A River To The East by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Tuskar Rock Press, 130pp, £12.99), provides it from its long, multi-clause opening sentence to the final words. But there is an ominous note in those final words and frequently a sense of disorientation for the main character, known throughout as the grandson of Prince Genji. He has escaped from his minders and is seeking a Buddhist monastery.

It is in the telling of this apparently simple story that the immense appeal of this beautiful novel lies. At one point, Krasznahorkai speaks of “the strength of simplicity’s enchantment” and, through Mulzet’s exceptional work, we can appreciate the enchantment of language that is attentive to precise details and which conjures the serenity that is sought throughout. The author makes his intentions clear when he says that, “this tradition was built upon observation, repetition, and the veneration of the inner order of nature and the nature of things, and that neither the meaning nor the purity of this tradition could ever be brought into question.”

There is little order, and even less agency, in the life of Dawit, the main protagonist of Black Foam by Haji Jabir, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey (Amazon Crossing, 224pp, $14.95). He is trying to make his way from Eritrea to Israel, where he hopes to be accepted as part of the Jewish diaspora. To achieve this means crossing many borders, being detained in refugee camps and always being treated with suspicion.

He changes his name and, when necessary, his own story. This results in a comical scene in which David, as he is then called, begins to tell the life story he has been assured, by another refugee, will secure his onward travel, only to have the UNHCR official sarcastically ask, “And when did your mother die?” Instead, he tells a very long story that enchants the official. Veracity is always in doubt in this cunningly constructed novel where knowledge of when to reveal and when to conceal is reflected in a structure that frequently misleads the reader, fracturing time and truth.

A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano, translated by Brian Robert Moore (Pushkin Press, 191pp, £10.99), was first published in Italy in 1957 and has only now been translated into English. Set during the second World War, it is narrated by Giulia, a woman who has had to take refuge in the cold, cluttered room of a house owned by two of her cousins while her husband Stefano is away on duty.

When she befriends two other exiles, Ada and Paolo, a close friendship develops, growing in intensity when Paolo becomes ill and takes refuge in the countryside. Much of the appeal of the novel derives from Giulia’s awareness of what is around her as she walks to the house. Very effective use is made of the way nature, weather and even the lonely twisting of side roads become manifest in the characters. The closeness of the trio is evident in the sleeping arrangement in which Giulia lies – with no sexual purpose – in the same bed as Ada and Paolo. Waking during the night, she sometimes looks out at “a little square garden, buried under the snow ... I felt I was grasping a little bit of the ultimate sense of things.” So do we with this exquisite novel.

[ Gains in translation for fiction readers and publishers ]

The imminent closure of a Spanish bookshop that has been a source of knowledge and enjoyment for readers as well as a welcoming space where the lost might find themselves is central to The Last Days of Terranova by Manuel Rivas, translated by Jacob Rogers (Archipelago, 305 pp, £13). Just as the bookshop contains hundreds of disparate tales, so the novel gathers the stories of people whose lives are linked to Terranova, the bookshop opened in 1935 by Comba, the daughter of a fisherman who, knowing he was dying of tuberculosis, saved enough money to allow her to fulfil her dream.

Because the bookshop was open during Franco’s dictatorship, struggles against censorship, the smuggling of banned books and the protection of dissidents thread through the novel, binding stories that push against the notion of a central narrative, instead introducing incidents and characters without prelude. It is a demanding read but Rivas exercises terrific control of this fragmented chronicle, allowing Vincenzo, the main narrator, to illuminate the depths of his feelings of saudade – a recurring motif – through to a marvellous ending.